Make your hosted UI beautiful with CSS, a logo, and CDK. — CloudFormation support for customizing the look and feel of Cognito’s Hosted UI is limited and, as CDK depends on CloudFormation, that means CDK support for it is also limited. Setting a logo image (the customization you probably want) isn’t supported in CloudFormation at all and even tweaking the CSS is…

Automate the invalidation of a CloudFront cache using CDK, Python, Lambda, and CodePipeline. — I’ve previously written about building cross-account deployment pipelines in CDK and Python. I’ve also shared a project that allows you to build them for deploying SAM apps, simple CDK stacks, and S3 hosted web apps. …

The AWS CDK makes it really easy to create a VPC and subnets and to use those instantiated objects in your CDK project when creating VPC-bound assets like EC2 and RDS instances. …

I recently released an open-source project that aims to create a solid foundation for anyone needing to build a cross-account deployment solution that follows the dedicated “DevOps account” model recommended by AWS for deploying code into different environments (dev/staging/prod) from a single centralised account. The key benefit of isolating the…

Most of the time, working with the AWS CDK is a joy. Other times, you feel like it’s punching you in the face repeatedly. …

The names AWS uses for its products range from the excruciatingly literal (eg “Amazon Managed Streaming for Apache Kafka”) to the obscure, but cool-sounding (“Athena”, “Kinesis”). Sometimes they’re just confusing, sounding like they do something they don’t (eg “AppSync”, “Artifact”). Every now and then though, AWS hit on names that…

S3 was the first service that AWS released into production. Back in 2006, the product deserved it’s moniker “Simple Storage Service”. The basics were there — you could create a bucket, put objects in it, and control access to it with access control lists based on IAM users. Unfortunately, security…

Cost Optimization is one of the AWS Well-Architected Framework Pillars, and I’ve been applying this discipline to my own AWS accounts. I don’t spend a lot in these accounts, but it can run into hundreds per month across all of them. Sometimes I’ll see increases I didn’t anticipate, but usually…

My job involves working with customers who are adopting (or increasing their adoption of) the AWS Cloud. Often I encounter confusion about how to do Infrastructure as Code (IaC) well. It’s not uncommon for developers to have adopted an IaC approach for part of their infrastructure, but to have reverted…